Today, we're building easy to install
floating shelves with wireless LED lights. We just started the office renovation
and I built this eleven drawer cabinet, which is working out great,
but now we need to address the wall. We've got a big open span here, so I think three floating shelves
is going to work. Now having those LEDs in there
is going to be awesome, not sure exactly how I'm going to do that,
but we'll figure it out. I'm Brad from FTBT let's build something awesome. All right. I'm going to be making
these out of three quarter inch birch plywood, and each of these sheets
is going to be able to give me two shelves. I'm to start breaking down
the plywood with my track saw. We're basically going to be using
all the rest of this, cutting out just a few parts
to make the folded miter box. Here's kind of how this is going to work. I've cut out a little piece of paper
and you'll have a top on the bottom, a front and then two sides. And then when they all fold in together,
you'll have a nice little floating shelf and cutting down on the cross cuts
first is going to make it the easiest For the next cuts I need to adjust the bevel on the track saw
and I'm actually going to go past 45 degrees here, so I'm going to go
right at 46 and lock it down. So by setting the saw past 45 degrees, that means we will have a tight outside corner
and there will be a gap on the inside, but that will all be hidden. It'll be a nice place
for the glue squeeze out to go as well. Now I'm going to mark in from each side
the depth of my shelf and these are going to be ten inches
because ten inches, about the largest, you can go and still get two shelves
out of one sheet of plywood. All right, now, we've got that
nice bevel down the side here, and I'm going to do the same exact thing
over on the other end. And then we can start cutting everything apart and in the end,
we'll cut this into smaller pieces and we'll already have the bevel on it. We've got bevels on the ends, and we do have a bevel on the main sheet,
but it's the wrong direction. So now all we have to do is flip the track
around and make the same exact cuts, except with the bevel
going into the main board. All right now, we could just go ahead
and use the track saw to cut down the length, and if you don't have a table saw
that works totally fine, but I'm going to have a little bit more control on the table
saw and I think it’s going to get a better cut. So I'm going to move over and do that
for the rest of the length cuts. Now I can take the blade
up and tilt it to about 46 degrees before I do that, I'm going to mark
a triangle across these boards so I can easily put them back together
and not get them mixed up. I can just raise the blade up here. I'm going to use one of these digital
angle finders to set the blade. These things are really cool
because you can just zero them out right on your table and then attach it
to the side of a table saw. Then I can adjust the tilt of the blade
until it gets over to 45 and a half or 46 degrees. And these things are awesome.
You can pick them up at Woodcraft. You can pick up all the tools
that I use over at Woodcraft. They're an awesome sponsor of the channel, and I'll have a link down below
in the description to woodcraft.com. You can go check them out online or visit
one of their 70 locations around the US. Now I can run each panel
through on one side and then flip it around on the other,
and I'll have my top and bottoms. And then we can deal with the middle. And it’d look a lot cooler
if I took the blade guard off, but I like safety
and I hate dust, so it staying on. Right, now, we've
got all of our parts, I've got three pairs of sides
that will match up with three fronts. And all these have the miter cut on one side
and need it on the other side still. Now this last cut is going to define
the thickness of your shelves because it will go on
the sides and the front. And you can adjust
the thickness as you want, but obviously you can't go any thinner
than an inch and a half because you have the full plywood top
and bottom. And on all these angled cuts Make sure you're using your guard
and if you are not using your guard. Make sure you're using a good push stick.
Or better yet, do both. Make sure your hands are protected
or away from the blade. Alright, moment of truth,
I’ve not dry-fit these yet, I figured we'll just do it on camera
and see what happens. What could go wrong? So I'm going to spin around.
And I gathered all my A-parts because I labeled everything,
so that helps out. Let’s see which way so are these triangles
really help out as well Ooh, not bad. Not bad at all. Oop, I almost dropped it. I think that's gonna do! Well, I just got done recording a whole thing
and assembling this. And I'll tell you what,
it did not turn out as I had planned. “...what could go wrong?” Definitely coming untaped. No! That is not how to do it. *sigh* It shouldn't be this hard. Now I've done this in the past
using packing tape, and it's worked great. But I use this new tape that I've had
and it doesn't have as strong as of an adhesive. So it's just all coming up
and not holding it well at all. And I had a horrible time flipping it over
because everything was coming off, so I went out and grabbed some filament tape
and this is very different. This has the actual reinforcement
inside there, and it's a little bit more flexible. I actually, got this tip from Spencer
Lewis of Insider Carpentry. He's got a great video
on floating shelf installs in all kinds of tips. He's
awesome. Go check him out. I was trying to find other tapes
that people used, and I found this video is very helpful. So I'm going to unwind this and put some
of this new filament tape on there, and hopefully we'll be in business. And with a stronger tape, this should fold
over a lot easier as well. Oh, yeah, that's
how it's supposed to work. All right. This looks awesome
now the top edge is almost perfect. Yes, it is. There's some little gaps on the bottom, but that's OK. We can seal those up
before I glue it, though. So these are spacers I cut over
on the table saw and I made them to the exact width of inside
so that it could be at 90 degrees. I cut these to size so that there's about
two inches in the back, and that will allow us
to have the mounting hardware in there and not cause any interference
with the support blocking. Now I can just make sure
the joints are all clean, put some glue on the bracing, as well as the miters,
and I'll fold it up and tape it in place. Alright, I'm gonna flip
it over and check out the front corners, see how things are coming together,
that looks pretty good. Now, another tip I got from
Spencer was to burnish the corners while the glue is still wet,
so I'm just lightly rolling over the corners to close any gaps and that way, and the glue will dry
everything nice and tight. And you won't have any issues
closing them up when the glue is dry. I flipped it back down
and if I cut everything right and assembled it, these edge pieces
should fit in like butter. Oh yes. We'll put that on a roll because it's butter. All right, I can set this aside
to dry overnight and come back tomorrow. All right. Next day
let’s see how these miters turned out. Oooh, that is looking
good, there are a few little gaps. Now, there are a few little gaps I'm just going to try
to close those up with the screwdriver That almost disappears
and with some finish on there you won't be able to tell. Now we're going to go over and start working on the LEDs before we do
finish sanding. All right, LED down lighting is just cool.
I think it's awesome. I wanted this to be completely wireless
so I could run it off of a USB battery pack and then have a remote control to control it. Some of them also have Bluetooth and apps
and things like that, but those take a little bit
more power typically. So this is a cheapo version
I bought just to see how it looked. This only has 80 LEDs in the total five
meter length or 16.4 feet, versus this little more expensive variety
that has 300 per five meters. So this one's going to have four times more LEDs than this one,
and this one gives a lot truer color. I'll have a link down below
to both of these, but here's what they look like
just to show you a little comparison. So these are both running off
the battery packs. This is the cheaper version
with the 80 lights per five meters, and this is supposed to be white
and it's definitely a blue tinge. So it's not a very nice light at all,
and they're very spread out Versus this one, which has 300 per
five meters, check this out. And this all looks way better. It's got a lot more pixel density.
The white actually looks white versus blue,
and this is just a much better product. Both of these run off of remotes,
and they have different types of modes that you can use. And whenever you buy,
make sure you get RF radio frequency versus infrared because it doesn't need
a direct line of sight to control it. And the one downside
to what I'm specifically using, I already had the lights,
so I just bought a controller. So it's kind of a bunch of different
pieces you have to piece together. But I love playing around
with electronics, so I have fun doing it. If that's not your thing, buy
it all in one kit. I don't know. Do
you guys like electronics? Let me know down in the comments
because I really like it. I want to do more electronics, LEDs
and kind of fun stuff in my projects and to make a recess
for this little aluminum U-channel I'm going
to put together a quick jig. I used the offcuts
from those very first cuts on pieces of plywood,
and I cut them down to three inches because I want the lighting three inches
from the back of the Strip. Now all I'm going to do
is put this in between them. Now I can just C.A. glue on the end
cap here, spray a little accelerator on there. We'll do the same on the other end. All right, that will work. I did a couple of test cuts with the jig
and I found the depth that I need. And this is going to fit in there
nice and flush with the surface. So now I can cut
the channels in the shelves. The grooves are in place
for the aluminum channel, but now I need to make some holes in the channel as well as the bottom
of the shelf for the LEDs. There's going to be little connectors
that go in to hide all the electronics and still connect
to the strips on the outside. I'm going to add a couple
of really cool things to this to make it completely wireless and rechargeable,
but I'm waiting on Amazon to deliver it. So in the meantime, I'm
going to go ahead and clean this all up. I'm going to use
a card scraper to get off most of the glue card scrapers are great because you can really control
how much you're taking off and you won't burn through it
like you do with sandpaper sometimes. After that, I'm going to put on
a few layers of Halcyon Clear from Total Boat and get this thing
finished up, and by that time hopefully the truck shows up
and then I can wire everything together. To make the mountain cleats
for the shelves, I'm going to use the off cut piece
that I had from the rest of that plywood. I'm going to cut it into some
strips and then assemble. I've got all my parts here, and I'm just going to be basically stacking these together
and then having little pieces on the edge so that the back ends up
being a double thick layer and everything is going to be glued
or nailed together and give it a lot of strength
to hold up the shelves. The Amazon guy finally showed up
and I got a switch and a charging cable. We've got a battery which has a USB powered adapter that goes
into the controller into the LED. And this works great. The problem, though, is because it's RF,
it's always listening, meaning it's always draining the battery so you can see
the light is on even when it's off. But the switch is going
be the secret that's going to help the battery from draining
when it's just not being used. So I'm going to wire this
into the power cable, but eventually I will need to recharge it. So I'm going to use this extension cable
so that I can charge the battery from outside of the shelf. I will just put this right
into the bottom of the shelf and then connect
the inner part into the battery. And that way I can plug in
and charge the battery. I mean, get all this stuff wired up
and then we'll be ready for install. All right, let’s test this out. *cackles* Yes! Oh, it works. All right, this is looking great. The button is working,
and now I am ready to install these, but I grabbed the cleat
just to take a little look. I did not factor this in at all. And this runs directly into the button
and into where the power charger is going to be.
So I'm going to have to cut this one down. But for the other two, I will adjust it and move the buttons
closer to the front edge. You know, we almost got out of it,
but #MistakesWereMade. I'm going to wrap all these up
and then install inside. I got the brackets up and using a six or seven foot level is a lot better
than using a four foot level to do that. So now all I have to do
is fit these on there and hopefully they didn't bow too
much and they'll go right on All right, this fits great. I’ll put the rest up, and we'll be done. Let's see if they work. Oh, yeah, that's nice. If you want, check out
the rest of the office makeover, I have a playlist
cued up for you right there. If you're not subscribed
already, we'd love to have you as part of the team and a big
“thank you” to all those folks that are part of the FTBT
Builders Club. Until next time, guys
get out there and build something awesome.
